Venezuela’s Maduro Claims Control of National Assembly, Tightening Grip on Power
It was the last political institution in opposition hands. Now President Nicolás Maduro’s has moved closer to total control of the state.
Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, moved on Sunday to consolidate his grip on power by taking control of the country’s last independent institution and sidelining the lawmaker who had staked a rival claim to the presidency.
As Mr. Maduro’s security forces surrounded the National Assembly building, his supporters blocked the re-election of the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as the body’s head. That deprived Mr. Guaidó of the position that allowed him challenge to Mr. Maduro’s leadership.
By the end of a chaotic day, Venezuela’s political turmoil had somehow found a way to worsen.
The country already had two men who claim to be its rightful president and two rival legislatures. Now, one of the legislative bodies has two competing leaders.
After Maduro backers elected their own man on Sunday to lead the National Assembly, Mr. Guaidó’s supporters gathered at a newspaper’s headquarters, and in a dramatic roll call vote, re-elected him to the leadership position.
The political chaos comes at a time when Venezuela is facing economic collapse. Hunger is widespread, and millions have fled the country.
By seizing control of the National Assembly, Mr. Maduro cemented his control over the country. But the move was immediately denounced by members of the Venezuelan opposition, who called it a “parliamentary coup d’état,” and by critics abroad.
“Maduro saw this as an opportunity to take over the only institution still widely regarded as legitimate,” said Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue. “The international community will not recognize the new National Assembly.”
A year ago, Mr. Guaidó declared himself head of a caretaker government, just two weeks after being elected head of the Assembly. Standing in the streets of Caracas with hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Mr. Guaidó asserted that Mr. Maduro’s 2018 election was fraudulent.
Invoking an article of the Constitution that transfers power to the head of the Assembly if the presidency becomes vacant, he claimed the country’s leadership.
That claim was quickly recognized by dozens of foreign governments, including the United States, which backed Mr. Guaidó effort to take power by imposing crippling sanctions on Mr. Maduro’s government.
To maintain his claim the interim presidency, Mr. Guaidó needed to be re-elected as head of the Assembly on Sunday, according to analysts inside and outside the country. His victory was expected, since the opposition controls the legislative body.
But at the last minute, members of the National Guard prevented Mr. Guaidó and other supporters from entering the Assembly’s building. Video footage showed Mr. Guaidó attempting to climb over the spiked metal fence to gain entry to the building where the vote would be held.
Inside, Mr. Maduro’s party swore in as head of the Assembly a legislator named Luis Parra, a former member of the opposition who turned against Mr. Guaidó after the Assembly leader opened a corruption claim against him. There was no vote count.
Mr. Parra then issued a statement calling for a “national reconciliation,” saying that his first goal was to put an end to confrontations “from those sectors that clearly wanted to destroy the Parliament today.”
On national television on Sunday night, Mr. Maduro called the election of Mr. Parra “a rebellion from within the Assembly” and said “the country rejected and rejects Juan Guaidó.”
The United States condemned the move.
Michael Kozak, acting assistant secretary for the Department of State’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, said Mr. Guaidó “remains Venezuela’s interim president under its Constitution.” He said that Sunday’s “phony National Assembly session lacked a legal quorum.”
In recent weeks, the opposition and the United States government had accused Mr. Maduro of trying to block Mr. Guaidó’s re-election by bribing and harassing lawmakers. In December, Elliott Abrams, the United States special envoy to Venezuela, accused Mr. Maduro of trying to pay deputies up to $500,000 each to vote against Mr. Guaidó’s re-election.
In an interview just days after Christmas, Mr. Guaidó, 36, insisted that he had the votes for re-election. But he acknowledged that Mr. Maduro was unpredictable and that anything could happen. “There is no manual,” he said, “for battling a dictatorship.”
A year after Mr. Guaidó first stepped onto the national stage, garnering widespread support among Venezuelans, he appeared to be losing ground. Since February, his approval ratings had fallen about 20 points, to 42 percent, according to the Caracas polling firm Datanálisis.
Venezuelans are struggling to deal with unmet expectations.
And in Mr. Guaidó’s own assessment, he underestimated the government’s “ability to inflict harm” — meaning its willingness to threaten those who dissent. He cited the recent disappearance of one member of his party, Gilber Caro, who has not been seen since Dec. 20.
“The persecution is brutal,” he said.
He also gravely underestimated Mr. Maduro’s hold on the armed forces, which are one of the pillars of his government, analysts said.
In late April, in one of the most dramatic moments of the year, Mr. Guaidó gathered his supporters at an air base named La Carlota and called for mass military defections. It was, he said, the final stage of “Operation Liberty.”
“The moment is now!” he said on Twitter. “Together we’re invincible!”
But the troops failed to arrive.
Mr. Maduro had spent years handing privileges and lucrative business connections to high-ranking officers to ensure their loyalty. The officers Mr. Guaidó sought to sway had everything to lose — and at best uncertain gains — if they switched sides.
Manuel Cristopher Figuera, Mr. Maduro’s former head of intelligence and the highest-ranking official to defect last year, said in an interview said that two top officials who had pledged to support Mr. Maduro’s ouster ultimately reneged, helping seal Mr. Guaidó’s fate.
While huge protests in the region have forced out the president of Bolivia and pushed leaders in Chile and Ecuador to respond to citizens’ demands, Venezuelans have mostly retreated from the streets. And President Trump, who once floated the possibility of a military intervention in Venezuela, has turned his attention elsewhere.
“It’s not that the Maduro government is particularly strong, but it survived,” said Margarita López Maya, a longtime Venezuelan political scientist who lives in Caracas. “And this is victory for them: surviving.”
But better that I suppose than bush fires. It means I haven’t been able to go swimming with the dolphins that have been visiting the Bay over the past week though.
